“You, Rachel, Jonathan, the money — I thought I could just… keep all the plates spinning.”

“That isn’t handling things, Marcus,” I said.

“That is destroying everything you touch and calling it balance.”

And that, I have come to believe, is the real lesson of Marcus, the one worth extracting from all the wreckage, because it is a mistake that men far more successful than Marcus make every day.

He believed, genuinely, that he could have everything — the wife and the mistress, the sons and the secret son, the appearance of a marriage and the substance of a betrayal, the money by any means and his own comfortable self-image both.

He believed he was managing it, keeping the plates spinning, when in truth he was not managing anything; he was simply postponing the moment when it all came down, and borrowing against a future in which it would.